Yuriko Tajima’s suspected depression

Yuriko Tajima’s suspected depression is a long-hidden condition whose effects reach across her family life and later relationships. The story traces it through recurring illness, self-blame, withdrawal, and a departure that her husband and son could not fully understand at the time. Only years later do Kyoichiro Kaga and others begin to piece together what she may have been experiencing, making the illness not merely a diagnosis but a source of lasting uncertainty, regret, and belated recognition.

Signs and delayed recognition

In Sendai, Yasuyo Miyamoto first sees Yuriko’s health falter in ways that seem inconsistent: at times she has a mild fever, at others she feels generally run-down and misses work. When Yasuyo urges her to get a proper medical checkup, Yuriko repeatedly says she is fine. She eventually returns to work with her familiar commitment, so the apparent recovery masks rather than resolves the concern.

The pattern returns years later. As Yasuyo’s restaurant struggles amid increased competition, Yuriko’s health again deteriorates and her absences become frequent. She asks permission to quit, apologizing that she is causing trouble and saying that Yasuyo would be better off replacing her. Yasuyo refuses to treat her as disposable: she reminds Yuriko that she helped make Seven what it is, offers her time off and treatment, and promises that any replacement will only be temporary. Her response recognizes both Yuriko’s importance to the bar and the seriousness of what is happening to her.

By then the change is visible in Yuriko’s appearance: she has lost so much weight that Yasuyo finds it painful to see, and the softness of her formerly oval face has disappeared. Yet Yuriko again insists that she is fine and does not want Yasuyo to worry. Yasuyo notices that her face seems even more blank and expressionless than before. The contrast between the repeated reassurance and the observable deterioration makes the illness legible to those around Yuriko without giving them a way to reach her.

Family pressures and the possibility of depression

Kaga later recounts that his mother’s inner state changed after his grandmother died. His grandmother had been Yuriko’s strongest source of emotional support, someone who listened and encouraged her; after her death, Yuriko was left without that support. Kaga was still too young to offer meaningful help, and his father did not understand the change until much later. The loss therefore mattered not only as bereavement but as the removal of the person who had helped Yuriko endure her difficulties.

One evening, while the family sat at dinner, Yuriko suddenly began to cry. She called herself a failure as a human being, wife, and mother, and said she would never be able to make her husband or son happy. Afterward, she returned to herself and apologized, asking them to forget what she had said. Kaga remembers the episode only dimly and even allows that the memory may be imagined. That uncertainty is part of the account: the family had glimpsed her distress, but neither Kaga nor his father then possessed a clear understanding of it.

When Shuhei Matsumiya asks whether the condition might have been depression, Kaga agrees it is very possible. He identifies low self-esteem and hopelessness as familiar symptoms, while stressing that people in his mother’s time generally knew little about depression. His father, he believes, may not have realized that Yuriko was ill. The story thus presents her self-condemnation not simply as a judgment on her character or conduct, but as possible evidence of a condition her family lacked the knowledge to recognize.

Departure, guilt, and family consequences

Kaga says that Yuriko kept her pain to herself for years, until she could no longer endure it and left the family. She left a note explaining that she no longer had confidence in herself as a wife or as Kyoichiro’s mother. His father understood only then that she had been under immense psychological pressure. Kaga’s account links the note’s language of failure to the words Yuriko had spoken at the dinner table, turning a private outburst into a pattern that had gone unrecognized.

Kaga’s father did not pursue her. In his view, his failure to help Yuriko through her mental-health difficulties made him responsible, and he believed that leaving her alone might be better for them both. He also became convinced that she must have wanted to see her young son before she died; imagining that she might have wanted such a meeting caused him physical pain. His decision not to search for her and his belief about what she may have wanted remain bound together by guilt, rather than by any certainty about Yuriko’s wishes.

Years later, Kaga visits the household altar and thanks Yasuyo for what she has done. When he asks what his mother said about leaving, Yasuyo reports that Yuriko never gave details and only said it was all her fault, that she had failed as a wife and mother. Kaga reacts with dismay at the word “Failed.” His response shows how the language that may have expressed Yuriko’s illness continued to shape the family’s understanding of her long after she could no longer explain herself.

Later testimony and the limits of understanding

A letter from Shunichi Watabe, who had been in a long-term relationship with Yuriko in Sendai, offers a further account of her state of mind after she left her family. Watabe says Yuriko did not speak of her family for more than a year after they met, then one day told him the story. According to his letter, she believed she had been a burden to her husband from the start of their marriage, felt guilty about conflict with her in-laws and her mother’s death, and came to doubt her ability to raise a child. He too considers it likely that she had clinical depression, while noting that the condition was not understood in those days.

Watabe’s account says that Yuriko lived with this sense of failure for years and developed a persistent preoccupation with suicide. He writes that the sight of her sleeping son could stop her from acting on it, because she worried about who would care for him. His testimony gives Kaga an account of his mother’s life that he could not obtain from her directly, but it remains a retrospective letter: the story reaches him only after Yuriko’s death and through another person’s recollection.

The effects of the family’s separation also appear in the later history of Hiromi Asai, whose mother’s departure and father’s suicide are described by a vice principal as neglect and abandonment of parental duty. Hiromi’s experience at an understaffed orphanage includes bullying, little privacy, and the absence of a family environment; support from Seizo Naemura and Motoko Yoshino helps her endure it. This account does not equate Hiromi’s circumstances with Yuriko’s suspected illness. It does show the wider consequences that a parent’s departure and death can have for a child, underscoring why Kaga’s father remained haunted by the possibility that Yuriko wanted to see her son.

Narrative significance

The illness is reconstructed through fragments rather than a single, definitive diagnosis: Yasuyo’s observations of absences and physical decline, Kaga’s imperfect childhood memory, his father’s later guilt, and Watabe’s letter. Each source illuminates a different part of Yuriko’s experience, while leaving the limits of what anyone could know intact. Her repeated insistence that she was fine stands beside evidence of worsening health and despair, and her language of failure returns in the note that explains why she left.

This delayed understanding gives Kaga’s search for his mother’s emotional history its particular weight. He cannot undo the separation or confirm every part of what she felt, but he can ask what kind of place she was in emotionally and listen to those who knew her. The suspected depression is therefore central to the story’s treatment of family love and loss: it helps explain Yuriko’s withdrawal without reducing her to a diagnosis, and reveals how suffering that remains unspoken can be mistaken for personal failure until the chance to respond has passed.